Marketers are ready to adapt their processes to content strategy, but the change will be stark

by drm on March 30, 2010

Edward Boches of Creativity Unbound asked some influential folks who went to SxSW what was their one big takeaway from the conference.

Kristina Halverson, CEO of Brain Traffic spoke to the readiness on the client side to make process changes that will enable content marketing strategies.

“My takeaway? Clients are ready to coordinate their currently siloed interactive marketing initiatives–social media, SEO, web and email communications, and so on—by creating a content strategy that defines and drives their content and its lifecycle processes. The larger implication is that organizations will need to reinvent themselves as publishers, creating new infrastructures to support the ongoing creation and care of relevant, quality content.”

Embedded in this well-crafted quote is a broad range of new skills and processes that are going to take a lot of work to establish within all kinds of organizations.

I was struck by this late last week as I met with one of our social media teams. This group is focused on implementing the social media applications platform that we’ve developed with our DigitalSherpa line of products.

My focus was to dig in on results: The actual results that were being delivered, the results that clients were able to define they wanted and the degree to which our dialogue with the clients was aligned.

As we spoke, it was clear that most of our clients had very little understanding of the broad impact that creating consistent, relevant digital content would have on their digital footprint and web activity. As a result, the client service focus was on activities that, in the grand scheme of things, were tangential to the ultimate benefits they would receive from the service.

This is a manageable disconnect, requiring us to focus more closely on education, training and innovative measurements. But it is a disconnect nonetheless.

Across all of our markets, I am seeing a increased focus on driving web-based business activity. But within that emphasis, I see very little understanding of how to create web footprints that are designed to convert activity in leads; of how to use social media tools to increase your content presence on the web; and to what degree social networking can be used to enhance your connection with those prospect, clients and business peers who are interested in being part of your social community.

The transition that Halverson sees coming is more than the addition of functional roles. To fully leverage a digital content strategy requires a seemless alignment of content focus across all parts of the marketing spectrum, and highly coordinated execution — including information sharing — between all of the different constituents who are managing the content, including the traditional advertising functions.

The marketers who do that the best will have creative and literate marketing leaders who are able to tell a story, let it acquire dimension and let it loose from the defined constraints of a brand. This is the stuff of folklore meshed into marketing, and the thought of that evolution is unsettling, no matter how oriented you are to the potential of social media tools

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  • http://www.nci.com drm

    That’s a great point Amy. At our company we’ve had brands that have adopted the tools quickly and others that have been much slower. The most confounding aspect, even for fast adopting teams, is learnig what kinds of content conform to their brand strategy. It is trial and error, and I don’t know how many brands will put up with that.

  • http://www.nci.com drm

    Tony, thanks for contributing I enjoy your writings on the topic. One nuance I think needs to get more explication is te threw dimensional aspect of this marketing strategy. It’s like Chinese checkers. As you create content, on a regular basis, to surround your brand, you create more relationships with consumers attached to your brand. The combined effect of content creation and consumer engagement– even in a limited fashion — widen your footprint on te web, driving more search traffic ad referrals to your web site.

    This combination of outcomes changes how you need to think of web design, customer conversion, customer management. It’s a lot.

  • http://www.keywordcommunication.com/ Amy Dean

    Making this move will require a cultural change from the top down. Employees need incentives to create, distribute and share compelling content consistently. What I've found works is mini-pilot programs. But even when senior leaders see the importance of integrated marketing communications, it takes a while for processes to be fully embraced. This really is a change management issue.

  • tonyfish

    enjoyed this post – worth picking up with clients that Digital footprint is also ( in terms of client side analysis) understanding who influences them and who they influence – along with attention, location and all the usual click and content data from social media sites.

    As an approach, the major concept to grab is marketing 1.0 deals with customers in isolation, solitude and separation based on an open loop solution. marketing 2.0 is engagement, relationship and conversation based on a closed loop and immediacy – cultural change is immanence. While marketing 1.0 had theory, 2.0 is real

    I am exploring this as well at http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com

  • http://www.ubervu.com/conversations/www.viralhousingfix.com/2010/03/30/marketers-are-ready-to-adapt-their-processes-to-content-strategy-but-the-change-will-be-stark/ uberVU – social comments

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by danielrmccarthy: Marketers are ready to adapt their processes to content strategy, but the change will be stark http://bit.ly/cE3mbI...

  • UrbaneWay

    Hey Dan,
    I wanted to weigh in here on what our direct experience was this year at SwSW, and how that is further propelling our shift in our marketing directives and initiatives. Urbane co-sponsored the road trip for the #DETChevySXSW Detroit Team, http://detroitsxsw.com/ where they competed with eight other teams across the nation for a chance to win a $10,000 sponsored tweet up in their hometown from Chevy.

    What I want to articulate here is the unorthodox path to a significant result, which for us is simply to Rent More Apartments.

    Your last paragraph IS the Marketing Takeaway here; “The marketers who do that the best will have creative and literate marketing leaders who are able to tell a story, let it acquire dimension and let it loose from the defined constraints of a brand. This is the stuff of folklore meshed into marketing, and the thought of that evolution is unsettling, no matter how oriented you are to the potential of social media tools”

    Here is a re-cap of what unfolded over the ten day road trip from Detroit to Austin. Pretty high profile event with our core prospect demographic, and for Urbane to be on the same ticket with Chevy illustrates the leverage and reach of Partnership Marketing. The following that this generated locally was pretty cool, and with most of the thousands, (yes over ten thousand) of Tweets and Re-Tweets, Urbane was attached, to lot's of them. Add in the dozen or so blogs, then the video blogs by this crew with their thanks to Urbane not only significantly broadened our local reach of available rental prospects, it also heightened awareness with prominent bloggers.

    We have just compiled our March Traffic numbers
    -) Traffic; Up 64% Year over Year Results
    -) Tours; Up 42% Year over Year Results
    -) Rentals; Up 178% Year over Year Results (No Concessions either)
    -) With the increased rentals, we finalized two straggling lease-ups and pushed occupancy of our stabilized communities to 98%
    -) Our Digital Footprint of our combined Urbane Digital Assets expanded to a little over 16,000 visitors in March

    But here is the point, no one from Urbane told any of these stories, that was handed off to the Brand Ambassadors, and with that, you don't even get to moderate much of what they are saying or doing, let alone control it. That is part of the difficulty that folks have with Social Media Marketing. I can tell you that each of the four we helped send off were expert publishers, each with an impressive brand reach themselves, and I am delighted that they have made a choice to share our Urbane Brand with so many of their friends and following they have influence over. Maybe Controlling the Message has long been an overrated fear.

  • http://mikewhaling.com Mike Whaling

    Dan, your last point is the one I find most interesting. While a lot of marketers are promoting the idea that more content on your site is a good thing (which is generally true), the true impact on a brand is seen when the content is coming from sources outside your own domain. Telling your story in a way that allows others to latch on to it and use it in their own way — Chris Brogan calls this “giving your stories handles,” so other people can pick them up and carry them forward for you. This becomes particularly important considering how important inbound links have become as part of any online strategy.

    My question is, do you think that most marketers are focusing on content creation from within their own teams and on their own sites, or do you see more of those marketers moving to include outside publishers in their content creation/distribution efforts? To your folklore reference, much of what we are talking about is simply building word-of-mouth buzz and finding ways to capture as many of those conversations as possible. Do you think brands need to become publishers themselves first, or can they effectively build a digital strategy by putting their brand message in the hands of other publishers with established audiences? Is it a good mix of both?

  • http://twitter.com/fguitton Frederic Guitton

    The world of social media is still very young. The biggest challenge is to agree to give up control over much of the content. The value that social media brings is in its ability to invite your prospective and existing customers to being active active participant in defining your brand.
    Dan, your comments are a great representation of some of the core challenges in how to adapt to this shift that has happened in how some (more everyday) prospective clients can be reached and engaged.
    It is important to have clearly defined goals when participating in social media. Eric make a great point by simply sharing the results measured from the effort and focus required to find the best way to get increased presence through the web.
    It is my view that at the end of the day it always comes down to generating web traffic, leads and conversion into clients. Before engaging in social media it is critical to have addressed the way people will be able to engage into doing business with you. Imagine an apartment community with great signage and marketing campaign but lousy conversion because the experience when stepping into the community is poor at best.
    The reason why many social media effort have failed have very little to do with how good or poor the content or delivery is but simply has to do with the most traditional gap that exist in sales; a poor conversion and sales model/execution. My opinion is that social media can dilute focus and create a false sense of success but we should never take our eyes of the ball which is generation more prospects and more clients.
    Thank you for this interesting post Dan and thank you Eric for sharing the concrete results of a social media strategy. Many would have stopped measuring at the number of tweets and visits but you brought it home by measuring where it matter most; how many new leases and what impact did that have on your NOI.